X06: BioShock Big Daddy Fight

Not even flaming teddy bears can take down these over-protective beasts. But they help.

By Jonathan Miller

In the underwater utopia of Rapture, there are only two things to worry about: basic survival and Big Daddies. Maybe it's not such a utopia after all.

At X06 in Barcelona today, creative director Ken Levine walked us through the second demo of BioShock, the first-person-shooter, RPG, action-adventure psychological thriller genre-bending whatchamacallit. This time around, Levine wanted to focus on the combat, a system that he says will redefine shooters, a system in which choice is key.

With six different modifiable weapons, with different types of ammunition, and about 50 genetic powers to enhance your hunt-or-be-hunted skills, you bet you have a choice. The demo started out in one of the early levels of the game in the medical building. Walking in, Joe encountered a friendly nurse, clad in starched-white uniform. The nurse, known as a splicer for altering her genetic structure, then tried to kill Joe with a combination of fireballs and teleporting. She also needs to work on her bedside manner.

Joe blasted the wench with his shotgun and pistol, dodging her genetically engineered fireballs. The explosive blasts showed off BioShock's dynamic fire system. A bush burned and the flames spread slowly to the surrounding walls. You could even line up pieces of wood and debris and bottles of liquor, a line that acts as a fuse to, say, a crate of dynamite for an explosive trap.

But this was no fire demo. Joe next tried to come between a Big Daddy - the hulking protectorates clad in giant iron deep-sea diving suits - and a Little Sister, the creepy little girls that consume and process Adam. Adam is the currency of Rapture used to upgrade your looks, physical skills and your ability to shoot a hive of deadly wasps out of your arm as projectile weapons. Check the video page out for that one. Yeck.

In Rapture, you have to scrounge for ammo and Adam and your fight for survival forever depends upon available resources and the way you choose to move through the game. To get Adam, you need to track down a Little Sister and either take it by force or bribe her with delicious lolly pops to persuade her to give you some. Either way, you'll have to deal with a Big Daddy, one of the most powerful enemies in the game.

In the demo, Joe approached a Big Daddy slowly, and it showed no reaction. If you don't bother him, he won't bother you. But, moving too closely to the Little Sister, Big Daddy picks her up, throws her over his shoulder and behind him, and proceeds to try and stick a drill through your face. When running around the lumbering Big Daddy, he will continually put himself between you and the girl. Clearly, his job is to protect her, and he does it well.

The Big Daddy proceeds to pound us to near-extinction, and Joe decides to try for the Little Sister in another way. Reaching for Splicer Irritant, a genetic enhancement that gives you the power to produce a foul-smelling chemical that seriously annoys enemy splicers so much that they will try and attack it. So Joe throws it on a Little Sister, and the splicer starts to attack.

In rushes Big Daddy, and now he is fighting the splicer and you are free to try and move in on the girl. Oops, Joe is caught by a security camera. Flying security bots swoop in, trying to terminate your unauthorized presence. You rush to a security console, use some Adam and turn off the bots. Then you use your hacking ability to reprogram them to fight for the powers of good, and you sick them on Big Daddy, who now has to deal with a splicer and the bots.

Still, Big Daddy holds his own. So Joe does the next most logical thing. He shoots a hole in a propane tank and it starts to spew fire; he uses his telekinesis ability to grab a teddy bear from the ground, light it aflame, and use a Jedi mind trick to push it at the Big Daddy and light it on fire. So logical.

So now Big Daddy is fighting bots, a splicer and is on fire, but he still is not going down. Somewhere above you, another angry splicer starts to hurl grenades at you. Using telekinesis, you intercept the grenades and throw them at the Big Daddy. After a few hits, he groans in dismay and falls to the ground, defeated, leaving a Little Sister to you. Do you kill her? Do you befriend her? As always in BioShock, the choice is yours.

This is just one of any number of ways you could try to take out the Big Daddy. The environment is completely interactive, so you could throw wine bottles if you like or teleport about blasting away with a shotgun. We only watched, but this kind of organic gameplay didn't feel forced or gimmicky, one of the reasons we continue to rave about BioShock.